Page 23 of Go Deep (A Bad Boy Sports Romance)
I was only going to put up with as much as I had to for this project. After that, we had no other need to interact.
“Look, I’m sorry, Cassidy. I’d explain it to you if I could, but it’s really complicated.”
“You don’t owe me any explanations.” I told him, keeping my eyes facing forward as he drove. I’d heard enough of his bullshit already. I was here to make preparations for the pitch portion of our project and set up the time for the interview with our business owner or investor. Nothing more.
“What the hell, Slade?” I asked as he pulled up to his frat house and parked. That’s when I looked over at him again. Sure, the student center was a block from here, but my gut feeling was dead on, that he was trying to get me alone with him.
“I figured we could work on the table in the foyer or the kitchen,” he told me, getting out of the car.
“Seriously?”
“I’m tired, all right?” He was getting that short-tempered, badass attitude I’d seen enough times on the football field and back when we were kids. “I don’t feel like those bright lights right now.” He looked pretty run down too. I don’t think I’d ever seen him look lethargic.
“Okay. Just don’t make a habit of this. Got it? And we’re staying on the main floor.”
“Fine,” he barked.
I followed him inside, relieved that we weren’t heading up to his room for another mindless session of stupid almost-life choices. We went straight to the kitchen, where he put on a pot of coffee.
“It’s a little late for caffeine, don’t you think?”
“Speak for yourself. I need this. Anyway, what are we going over with this project?”
“The pitch,” I told him, pulling out my computer tablet with the slide presentation.
“I think one of the points we need to make is that we can help with the over-saturation of shelters in the area,” he said first off. “When we talked to Gladys, that issue came up a few times. Lots of service providers, no coordination of pet placement activities. Meaning, they’ve all got small budgets and are duplicating their efforts unnecessarily, and to the same target audience of potential pet owners.”
“Good point,” I agreed.
He was pretty good at this. He hadn’t even looked at my slide deck and he’d gotten right to the point it had taken fifteen pages for me to get to. Our project needed to focus on two streams of thinking. First, the more obvious was how we could assist the public with the adoption process and with finding resources, like animal shelters or pet stores. Second, and possibly more important to a more consistent revenue stream was that we needed to focus more on shelters. They had established, underutilized budgets, and they had an interest in minimizing the number of animals left in their care due to mismatches between the pets and the people who visited their specific shelters.
While the coffee brewed, he sat beside me and took a look through the presentation. “Looks good.”
“I went with the idea of rotating the pet adoption drives at individual shelters instead of a centralized off-site location for several shelters to come together. This way we can draw attention to each location, and then cycle through the locations so it’s fair and lets people know where they all are. This also helps for people who want to adopt when there’s not a drive going on. They’ll know where to go to do that, since we’re not going to be running an actual shelter ourselves.”
“Smart. Did you email this to me?”
“Several times, but check the last email for the final draft.”
“Cool. How are we going to deliver this presentation? Maybe you can do the intro and I’ll get into the budgets and answer questions.”
“That could work.” This was going way better than I thought.
“So, we’re done with the first two hand-ins for this project?” Slade asked, getting up again to fill his coffee mug. I’d already declined on the late-night coffee buzz, so he didn’t bother asking me again if I wanted to partake.
“Pretty much. I’ve finalized your draft business plan, and if you’re good with this deck as is, we can call it a wrap until the write-up is due after Thanksgiving.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. We’re way ahead…”
“Sounds perfect.”
“With our notes from tonight, I’ll finalize the speaking notes for the pitch. We’ll need to run through it once or twice, and then I’ll set up a meeting with an owner or investor through Dr. Taylor.” I laughed. “He’ll be excited to know that we were able to work together on this project after all.”
“Yes, he will,” Slade agreed.
“I guess I should be thanking you for going all gung-ho and setting things up with the shelter.”
